Trust Your “Breaks”

It’s good to be back; back to the hustle and bustle; back to street musicians playing jazz on subway platforms and of course, back to Central Park, where I was sideswiped by a bike on my 13-miler today. Yes, as if you haven’t noticed, I’ve been away for the past week, taking a short break away from work. No internet access meant no blogging during the trip. But, I did have a few relevant thoughts that I jotted down while I was away that I wanted to share.

Hockey and basketball players usually take one or two days off to do this. Football players can take almost a whole week. Even baseball players, who arguably seem to be doing more of it when they’re on the diamond than when they’re not, perform much better after they’ve done it than when they don’t. Yet, it is surprising to me that there are some runners who either don’t believe in it or just don’t do it, and many others who don’t pay enough attention to it. In my opinion, it is the single biggest mistake that prevents us middle-of-the-pack runners from reaching our fullest potential at our distance events.

What, this “it” is, my dear RBFs, is the idea of rest and recovery, or taking sufficient time away from the road in some kind of proportion to the time you spend on it. Although the concept is basic and simple to implement during the off-season or at the beginning of the running season, it inevitability becomes less important and easily forgotten as we increase the miles and approach the peak of training for our long distance events. As a result of this seemingly innocent mistake, we develop dead legs, tired egos, not to mention a host of overuse injuries that may sideline us for the rest of the season. I believe I’ve detailed my own battles with this condition (in the old post titled A Cautionary Tale From a Running Schizophrenic), so I will not repeat my story here. Suffice it to say that my adventures last summer has made me realize the importance of rest days and its effects on my performance on the road. Not only so, but it has completely changed my perspective on the term. Whereas I used to regard rest days as an annoyance and an excuse to be lazy, I now perceive it as a time during which I’m allowing my body to heal itself and become stronger in preparation for my next run. As a consequence, I no longer blame myself or feel guilty for taking a break, whether scheduled or unscheduled. Instead, I focus on the positive benefits of resting, both physical and psychological, and anticipate the fresh legs I will have for tomorrow’s run.

All I'm saying, runners, is that in order to run well, you must rest and recover well. Don't neglect to remember to step off the pedal every once in a while, especially during high mileage weeks, to allow your body to heal. Trust your "breaks". After all, didn’t God Himself take a breather on the seventh day after working hard to create the heavens and the earth on the first six?